In any case, there are plentiful instances of stray and unhyphenated bits and bobs throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, though very few before 1840 and as far as I can see none at all before 1813, when the phrase elbows its cheerful way into a letter addressed by a bucolic manservant to the Reverend Mr. William Mendall in The Miser Married: A Novel, by Catherine Hutton.